Aug 222013
 

I’m working on a set of data refreshment scripts, which get data from file, do some transform, then send to a HTTP interface. Since the HTTP interface is kind of slow compare with reading and transforming data, I have several forked children processes to handle HTTP part.

Everything was done by Perl about 6 months ago, and everything seems good … until I started picking up Python. First sight is that Pyhon program is about 50% of Perl in term of LOC, which makes it easier to read, but seriously I don’t care about this too much as the logic is quite simple, however, when I tested Python programs and found that they are at least 50% faster than Perl’s, I felt nervous.

Two examples – Perl takes 13 seconds, Python takes 5, Perl takes 34 minutes, Python takes 10. Actually I’m really nervous at this moment thinking of my poor Python skills, I always worry if I made anything wrong with the translation (from Perl to Python), even I have verified result data for quite some times.

Will dig in after converting all scripts to Python.

  One Response to “Python vs. Perl”

  1. I didn’t get a consistent number across all scripts – for 5 data loading scripts I have, 4 of them gain >50% performance as mentioned above, but the the last one is almost identical. There is no significant different in all these scripts, I mean in logic, though the special one is handling large amount of data compare with others, but data is just a pipe flow through the processing codes, I’m not storing them at all …

    I will leave things running some more days and see if it is just a abnormal case.

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